The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown Audiobook

Quotes

• Nina Sharma is an ardent, fiercely intelligent explorer of American life in all its hybrid complexity. Indian American and African American worlds collide and collaborate; so do love and anger, art and politics, fear and ambition, grief and wit. ‘Collection’ is too temperate a word for these essays: each is an act in a suspenseful, still-unfolding play.

  — Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System

• Nina Sharma’s thoughtful debut is equal parts memoir, criticism, and long-ranging conversation with a new friend. A love story for the ruminative reader that is generous with both scrutiny and romance.

  — Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

• I put off writing a blurb for this delicious book because I could not bear the idea of its author’s voice no longer accompanying me through my days. Nina Sharma has done something extraordinary with The Way You Make Me Feel—even unprecedented. This is more than a memoir. It is a modern story of life in the diaspora captured through the lens of an unsettlingly brave and honest sage, a woman of tremendous insight and gifted with the keenest of literary chops. It is utterly absorbing, intelligent, disturbing (in the finest way), and musical. Sharma’s narrative sensibility moves seamlessly and profoundly between the personal and political. As a reader, I learned things and I felt things. But at bottom, this is a for real love story—love of community, of color, of the other, and most of all, love of self.

  — Emily Bernard, author of Black is the Body

• In a world that seeks to divide, Nina Sharma’s charming and insightful essays show us how love humbles, connects, and inspires us to be better allies. By deftly weaving in pop culture, politics, and history into her personal narrative, she explores the ways in which we are taught to inhabit our identities—and how love so often requires us to unlearn these rigid norms.

  — Prachi Gupta, author of They Called Us Exceptional

• Nina Sharma’s The Way You Make Me Feel is a delicate balance of memoir, cultural criticism, and history. It moves seamlessly between love story and the interrogation of race, making insightful, brilliant connections. Sometimes funny, sometimes haunting, Sharma’s work is powerful: days later, I’m still thinking about her essay on The Walking Dead and the murder of Vincent Chin.

  — Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls

• Nina Sharma has pulled off a bold feat: a collection of highly crafted essays that ring with improvisational verve. In fearless prose that manages to be witty, incisive, and nakedly honest all at once, Sharma shares scenes from her Black and brown marriage that reveal a great love story enduring alongside the paradoxes of race. Deftly intercutting personal tales with cultural critique, Sharma holds many to task: ‘the big baddie’ of whiteness, society, her family, and above all, herself. The way this book makes me feel is compassionate and in awe, and a whole lot smarter.

  — Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According To Fannie Davis

• The Way You Make Me Feel crackles with electricity only found in deep hybridity. This memoir chronicles a brown person coming of age in a racist United States and illustrates for us how allyship can fruit into a complicated, sweet accompliceship. A love story to South Asian and Black communities, Sharma’s debut is a must-read for those of us who depend on one another to survive America. Told through fragment and recurrence, personal narrative and love story, reading The Way You Make Me Feel makes me want to break out into song, I never felt so in love before.

  — Rajiv Mohabir, author of Antiman and Whale Aria

• A powerfully forthright portrait of an interracial relationship that doubles as an insightful investigation into the history of racism in America.

  — Publishers Weekly

• The Way You Make Me Feel crackles with electricity only found in deep hybridity. This memoir chronicles a brown person coming of age in a racist United States and illustrates for us how allyship can fruit into a complicated, sweet accompliceship. A love story to South Asian and Black communities, Sharma’s debut is a must-read for those of us who depend on one another to survive America. Told through fragment and recurrence, personal narrative and love story, reading The Way You Make Me Feel makes me want to break out into song, I never felt so in love before.

  — Rajiv Mohabir, author of Antiman and Whale Aria

• Sensual, sharp, and raw, Sharma’s memoir digs deep into the roots intertwining anti-Black racism and America’s South Asian diaspora, unearthing what often remains unsaid when establishing true allyship . . .  Through the lens of being in an interracial relationship, Sharma cleverly draws on pop culture, political discourse, and academic writing to deliver social criticism that persistently highlights the racial discrimination running beneath the surface of American policies and social conventions. Just as impressive as Sharma's composed, polished, and wholly sincere writing is her range of topics, including mental health, the model minority, police brutality, familial trauma, and COVID-19’s anti-East Asian racism—the breadth of all of which illustrates the complex racial fabric of America today.

  — Booklist